More than 35% of CityVoter’s traffic is now coming directly from Facebook and Twitter so we reached out to our local business audience to ask how these technologies are helping them promote and grow their businesses.

Below are the responses from more than 300 local business owners. Thanks to every business owner who filled out our Spring 2011 Survey. We hope your participation will help you and your peers with your future marketing efforts.

Question: How many hours per week are you spending on all of your marketing efforts?

Local businesses time spent on marketing Question: Of those hours spent on marketing, what percentage is spent on social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, email marketing, blogging)? Graph of percentage of marketing time spent on social media Question: What percentage of your annual expenses are marketing related?

Graph of Percentage of annual expense spent on marketing

Question: What percentage of your marketing budget is spent on social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, email marketing, blogging)?

Graph of percentage of marketing budget spent on social media marketing

 

Question: Do you use customer rewards to thank or reward customers? Question: Have you used a group buying site to offer a daily deal? Graph of the percentage of local businesses that use daily deals sites Question: How did the online deal benefit business? Graph of local business results of using daily deals Question: Do you plan on offering a deal in the future? Graph of businesses that will use online deals again Question: On average, how many phone calls per month do you currently receive from vendors offering (daily) deal services for your business? Graph of number of calls per month receive from (daily) deal services This data was collected from 321 local businesses that filled out our Spring 2011 Survey. They do business in a variety of different industries fitness (21), beauty/salon (34) , service (ex: dry cleaning, car wash, etc.) (47) , restaurant/catering (53) , retail (71) and other (107). Please sound off in the comments and let us know your marketing best practices.